Breaking History - Eli Lake and David Rose: The UK Censorship Machine Eats Itself

Episode Date: May 1, 2026

David Rose is the director of policy and research at the Free Speech Union (FSU), a UK-based nonpartisan organization that campaigns for freedom of speech. The FSU will publish a new report examining allegations tied to Labour Together, the political network linked to Keir Starmer. David joins Eli Lake to explain how his investigation describes a murky ecosystem involving claims of journalists labeled as Russian assets, the circulation of private intelligence-style dossiers, and the growing overlap between political advocacy and “disinformation” or “digital hate” laws in the UK. Our special episode on the UK being a “censor’s paradise” is here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

All right, well, welcome back, Breaking History listeners. We have another one of our interviews with an old friend of mine, David Rose, a veteran journalist who I got to know when he was, you know, just writing outstanding scoops for Vanity Fair, but he has written for almost everybody. And he is now the Director of Policy and Research for the UK's Free Speech Union, which does incredibly important work. By the way, listen to our episode from last year on the decline of free speech.

and how the UK was turning into a censor's paradise, where we interview the founder and president of that organization. So anyway, David, thank you so much and welcome to the podcast. Thanks for having me. So tell me, you have a new report, which is provocatively titled, Labor, that's the ruling party in the UK, their misinformation mafia. What's it about? What did you find? Well, it all started with this extraordinary scandal that broke in this country in early February.

Now, it basically emerged that the think tank, which essentially created Kierstama as leader of the Labour Party, which shoehorned him into power and engineered his selection, and then also had a huge impact both on his campaign to become Prime Minister and on the policy agenda, it emerged that it had commissioned a secret report to investigate journalists who had written stuff that was hostile to this think tank. labor together. Now, this was extraordinary because what this secret report essentially did was accused them of being Russian spies. It suggested that there were grounds for thinking that they were actually Russian intelligence assets. Now, I should say before we go any further, that this was completely baseless. There is absolutely no suggestion that any of the individuals who were accused had any kind of sympathy with Russia. It's simply a fantasy. But what makes this story so extraordinary

is that this think tank and the people close to it, on the one hand, they are happy to commission secret reports of a highly dubious nature, making false allegations. And I should say not just making false allegations, but passing those allegations to the UK's national cybersecurity center, which is part of the top secret GCHQ, essentially the British equivalent of the NSA, not only were they content to make these false allegations

against people with whose politics they didn't agree with, but those same individuals and people very close to them have for years been demanding much tighter controls on freedom of speech. And their big push now is for far more extensive online censorship of platforms such as X and all the others that were familiar. with. And the thing is, there is also a highly significant transatlantic dimension to this. One of the key figures in this kind of network is Imran Ahmed, who is the head of the Center for Countering Digital Hate. Now, currently, the Trump administration is trying to deport him from

the US, but he's been living there since 2020. He had incredible leverage with the Biden administration. And I think if the Democrats should regain power in the United States, there is every chance but he and his friend's agenda for far tougher censorship regulation in America will in fact come to pass. Well, before we get into our friend Imrod, I want to just kind of set a couple ground truths here. One of the categories you should say of material that should be censored online is Russian misinformation or misinformation, correct? Well, yeah, this is what I want to get into the irony of it all. Yeah. I mean, it's an extraordinary thing.

The people who want censorship have for years now been suggesting that there is this incredibly successful campaign by Russia to manipulate public opinion in the West. A lot of people take seriously the notion that Russia was largely responsible for Brexit, the referendum result, which has led to the UK leaving the European Union. When you actually dig into this, the evidence for this is extraordinarily flimsy. And what is also extraordinary is that there is a particular name that keeps cropping up again and again in multiple contexts. And that person is Christopher Steele, a former MI6 officer of no great distinction, who for years now has run a private intelligence company, Orbis Business Intelligence. Now, he is the author of the infamous Trump-Russiagate dossier, which overshadowed the 2016 presidential campaign.

But he is also closely involved with some of these people in this kind of anti-disinformation network, which itself is pumping out disinformation. So the levels of irony extraordinary. And I think we really do need a very serious clinical look, which actually says, well, actually is there a real foundation for this idea that, you know, Russia has, through digital bots, had a significant impact on Western public opinion. My hunch is that if you dug deep into that, you might find it was an awful lot less significant than some of its proponents claim.

But let's just establish, you know, Russia has oligarchs who have funded and through their intelligence service, they have attempted to spread digital propaganda. Before that, they attempted the KGB, certainly attempted in the Cold War to spread disinformation. It's a long-standing tactic. I think the United States has done that. UK has certainly done that. Information is part of, been part of warfare for some time. But, you know, we, and some of this has been documented in the 2016 election. There was, there were fake social media accounts that were controlled by Russians. There was an entire,

what, institute for, I forget the name of it, the internet research. There was, you know, there was, there was, the internet research agency, which was out of St. Petersburg, and it was an effort to try to put out phony stuff in Western Internet and American Internet. It's a leap to then say that this kind of activity, which is really kind of a norm from Russia, at least in America, you know, for the last hundred years in some ways or this, when it was the Soviet Union, is responsible for the election of a particular candidate and or responsible. for the success of the Brexit referendum. Well, absolutely.

I mean, the thing is, I think, you know, the evidence that Russian disinformation had any material impact on the Brexit referendum is negligible. I mean, I was reporting on all of that at the time. And, you know, no one was saying to me, oh, what I saw on Facebook last night, it's really made me think I'm going to vote to leave the European Union. Right. But the thing is this. I mean, as you rightly say, these kinds of campaigns, disinformation campaigns, you know,

information warfare. It was common throughout the Cold War. The Starzi had a special phrase for it, a special word. They called it Funkspieler. And it was basically trying to fool your enemy by, yeah, putting up bogus information. But the thing is this. Nobody in the Cold War was saying, this is such a terrible threat that we can't just, you know, present people with accurate information and the truth. What we have to do is have massive censorship so that we control what they are seeing. And the thing is, once you start trying to, in the name of, you know, say, national security control one class of information, you're going to have to have some kind of surveillance tools, which means you're looking at every kind of information. It means you're basically going to have. We're already there. Well, yeah, but I mean, it's going to get worse. I mean, these people, the people in this network, close to Kirstama, close to the current Labor Party leadership, I mean, they want far greater intrusion than anything that exists at this time.

Okay. So let's get to the report. There is an American lobbying firm, research firm called APCO, a very big company that operates in Washington and does a lot of this kind of corporate PR work. What was their role? They helped prepare this report. Is that right? Well, what happened was this. In November 23, a story appeared in the Sunday Times, the London Sunday Times, showing in detail that labor together, this very powerful think tank, which is a story. as they say, it created Kier Stama, first of Labour Leader, and then had a massive impact on his preparing for his role as Prime Minister. By the way, it was set up by Morgan McSweeney, who became his chief of staff in Downing Street, and of course was forced to resign just a couple of months ago because of the Peter Mandelton affair. But in any case, so this report revealed that this very political organization had broken the law. Under UK law, if you make political donations to a political campaigning organization, you have to declare them to the electoral

commission, or least the donor doesn't have to, the recipient does. Labor together, led by Morgan McSweeney, had failed to declare over £700,000 of political donations, basically from rich business people who clearly wanted to influence Stama's agenda. So they were fined 14,500 pounds, a fairly trivial sum, but anyhow, the Sunday Times did a big story. When they said they were just taking it, this. What Labour together then did, by this time, it wasn't run by Morgan McSweeney, but by a guy called Josh Simons, who later became an MP, and indeed a minister in Stama's government, what Justimons did is commission and investigation into the sources of this critical Sunday Times report, and also into other stories and books that were in preparation from journalists

who were hostile to Keir Stama. And the reason that was, they went to APCO Worldwide, is that somebody who was on the APCO Worldwide Advisory Board, a woman called Kate Forrester, was also a senior executive at APCO. And her husband was Keir Stahmer's Director of Communication. So they're really plugged in to that inner Stama circle. They said, we can do this report. We'll look at the sourcing. And they asked a guy called Tom Harper, who himself had been a senior reporter at the Sunday.

Times until a year or two before, they got him to investigate his former colleagues, but he didn't just investigate the former colleagues. He investigated in the end, well, his preliminary memo, his preliminary findings recommended investigating eight so-called significant persons of interest, all of whom were journalists. And they included a well-known American, Matt Taibi, who, of course. Matt Taibi. Oh, yeah. Of course. Yeah. So, because Matt Yes, he had published material that was critical of Stama and also of Labor together, but also Andrew Feinstein, who happened to be not only a former MP and government minister in South Africa, but also an extremely well-known journalist in London, who actually ran against Stama in 2020,

in his own constituency. They investigated him. They investigated a guy called Paul Holden, who eventually wrote a very critical book about how Starmor gained power. And the final report came out, well, they didn't come out. They had it by the middle of January, 2024. And it made these outrageous allegations

against these individuals who had no connection. Did they publish it or did they gave it to journalists, right? No, they didn't give it to journalists. They did give it to senior officials in Downing Street. It's very clear that people very close to Stama read this report. I mean, you know, Morgan McSweeney, his chief of staff,

or by that time in 2024, he was actually his campaign chief, technically. I mean, he had set up Labor together. He was very close to the people involved in all of this. And, of course, the communications director, was married to the woman who had suggested that APCO do this. So, I mean, there's an indelible connection there. But they didn't publish it.

What they did was this. So Josh Simons received this report, and I think the initial version was 54 pages long. and he sent it to the National Cybersecurity Center at GCHQ, the UK criminal at the NSA, suggesting that there had been an illegal Russian hack of the Electoral Commission, that the information that the Sunday Times are published about the unlawful donations had come from this hack, and he passed on all the details of all these journalists, except for one. So there was one journalist who had been accused of being a Russian spy,

a man called Gabriel Pogrand, a senior reporter, at the Sunday Times. It's Whitehall editor. The problem for Josh Simon's there was that, unfortunately, he and Gabriel Program were quite good friends. So he thought, well, this can't possibly be true of my friend, my friend, my friend Gabriel, he's my buddy. So he took out the 10 pages about about Gabriel Program. Right. But he passed it all on. All the rest of it went to GCHQ and, of course, you know, to Star Wars office. So it's extraordinary. Anyway, you know, two years go by, and then suddenly, in February 2026, the truth emerges. There was a leak. The very first publication and the first mention of APCO came on a South African website called

Democracy for Sale, and then the Sunday Times itself, which, of course, his reporter had been slandered in this report, and they picked up the story. And that's when, you know, there was quite a big political explosion in the UK. Yeah. Now, you... The Free Speech Union has seen a copy of the actual contract from APCO. Is that correct? Absolutely. And you've seen the report. Can you talk about how you got some of these original source documents,

which is really why this is such a valuable. I consider it a piece of journalism, even though it's a think-take report. No, if it's totally a piece of journalism. And, of course, most of my life, I've been a journalist. So, yeah, I mean, I'm not going to say who I got them from, but I got all the key original documents. I've got the contract. I've got the preliminary report that named eight journalists,

the significant persons of interest. And I've also got documents that show that Kate Forrester herself, member of the APCO executive, who's also an advisory board member of Labor Together, she had that preliminary report. She was sent it. So she knew that's what they were doing. And then I had the final report.

And then I had the redacted final report, which is the final report minus the section on Josh Simon's buddy Gabriel program, who, by the way, is an outstanding journalist and an excellent man. So you can see the whole picture here. But what makes it so shocking also is that, so Stama realized this was very embarrassing. So he asked the commissioner, sorry, the advisor on ministerial standards, who's a man called Lori Magnus, so Laurie Magnus, to do a short inquiry. And he kind of looked into this and said, well, basically, there's no evidence. that Josh Simons, now a cabinet minister or cabinet office minister,

has broken the ministerial code. And he took about two weeks to reach that determination. Now, what he hadn't done was considered tons of evidence that various witnesses had been sending him. Now, Josh Simons, when the story broke, he said, I never intended journalists to be investigated. I was shocked by what they were saying about Gabriel Pogran, although, of course, that hadn't been quoted.

My report is the first, of quoting at what the report actually says. But he said, you know, he said, Atko went beyond their contract. And anyway, because I knew that Gabriel was not a Russian spy, I never told GCHQ that he was. The trouble is, first of all, he did say that these other journalists were Russian spies. Well, the report said that, and he did send that to GCHQ. But it's also clear, you know, because you can see all this paper trail, that, you know, his colleague Kate Forrester from Labor together, had obviously received the information as well. Now, Lory Magnus was sent a lot of information from a guy who had some, though not all of the documents, who was also accused of being a Russian

asset, a man called Paul Holden. Paul Holden wrote a book which came out last year called The Fraud, and it's about Stama's rights to power. And as the title suggests, he's not terribly keen on Kirstama. But the thing is this. So Paul Holden sent all this information to Sir Lurie Magnus, and none of it appeared to have been considered when Lurie Magnus gave Josh Simon a clean bell of health and said he hasn't broken the ministerial code. Well, what is also kind of weird. What a tangled web we weave.

But what is so weird is that, so Josh Simons has apparently been cleared. He's apparently been exonerated. But then he resigned saying, oh, well, Well, I don't want my continued presence in the government to be a distraction from its important work. Now we get to the new nitty-gritty stuff that's happening this week. So, Paul Holden. I'm spending more time to do opposition research or my family. Anyway, Paul Holden.

Paul Holden writes to Solori Magnus after seeing the exoneration. And he says, I've sent you, you know, 23 pages of emails. quoting extensively from documentary evidence that suggests that Josh Simon is mistaken, perhaps not telling the whole truth when he says he never intended journalists to be investigated. And he said at one point,

I never saw... That sounds like only journalists were investigating, right? Exactly right. This is ridiculous. Okay, yeah. So the thing is this. A couple of weeks ago, Lori Magnus writes to him.

Says, I'm really sorry. I did get your email, but I never read them. Really? Yeah. So now what has just happened is that John McDonald, now John McDonald was leader of the Labour Party when Jeremy Corbyn, the very left-wing leader, was leader.

He himself is far more left-wing than Starma. But he has written to Laurie Magnus, supported by about 16 Labour MPs and peers, saying this is just not good enough. You've not done your job. You have not considered the evidence that actually there was a case to answer by Josh Simon. And Magnus's position is this.

He says, well, I can't do anything about it now because he's resigned. Because he's no longer a minister, I can't consider his conduct because I have no read it to investigate someone who's no longer a member of the government. So McDonald actually mentioned this in the House of Commons last week. He raised a point of order. But I think he's going to go further. You know, it does look like Solari Magnus didn't do his job properly. Yeah, all right. Well, I want to get back, though, to now the sort of nub of it.

I mean, this information is then given to the cyber security organization. Yeah. And what then do they do with it? I mean, what does the government do with this information? And then I want to kind of get to the substance of these claims. Well, what happens is that within a matter of days, the cyber people at GCSQ say, well, there's no evidence of a hack here. There's nothing to see.

There's no investigation. We don't need to investigate. There's no evidence that these people are Russian agents of some kind. No, exactly. I mean, they basically dismissed it. They just said, you know, this is preposterous. And there are emails to get onto that because this to me is the key part of it, right? It was just to make a comparison to the United States is that in the end,

the GCHQ, which is the equivalent of the NSA, just to remind our listeners, in the National Security Agency looked at partisan research effectively or research contracted for partisan reasons, let's just say that. And they said there's nothing to this, and they left it there. That is really a contrast to Christopher Steele's earlier role in Russia game, where he does the dossier and that the line agents for the FBI look at it and say, this looks like crap, and then they'd interview his, you know, the main sub-source who collected the information and he couldn't back up the stories.

And yet, the director of the FBI instead turns around and basically keeps the information open. And, you know, this is now ancient history, it seems, but the first two and a half years of the first Trump administration, Americans, Washington was obsessed. journalists were obsessed with a fraudulent story, in part because the FBI, which is in this, you know, playing the kind of role of the GCHQ, took seriously a bunch of partisan garbage that was paid for for partisan reasons. So that in some ways is to the credit of the GCHQ, is it not? I mean, this is like sort of...

Well, it is. I would agree with you do that. And I think it is encouraging that nobody has taken the crap that was in this report seriously. But there is a big U.S. dimension here. And that is, so who was the conduit between the Biden, I'm sorry, between the Obama administration and Christopher Steele? It was a man called Jonathan Weiner. And I think his name is one of the contacts, right? Exactly. His name appeared like 200 times in the Senate.

There were other FBI people who worked with. I mean, there were specific, we should say. Seale had a bunch of, he had contacts with the FBI. And Winer is a State Department guy. So it's a, yes, but you're right, Winer is one of his contacts. But the thing is this. Before Winer worked at the State Department, I think he was a special envoy for Libya.

He worked at ACCO worldwide. And as soon as the Obama administration ended, He went back to APCO Worldwide, and he still worked at APCO Worldwide, as its senior councillor in Washington. A woman called Ariuna Namsri worked at APCO Worldwide in Washington during that period. It is clear from documents released under the Freedom of Information Act in the United States that she met with Steele on several occasions to discuss so-called Russia Matters. And she is now executive director of the APCO Worldwide London Office. So there are connections between APCO Worldwide and Christopher Steele. Now, Atko Worldwide, have told me that these two individuals,

Nams Fry and Wiener did not play any part in the investigation into the journalists commissioned by Labour together. We have to accept that denial. But nevertheless, it's this kind of ecosystem, which is so finitious. Now, it gets worse because Steele himself, having written what you rightly describe as a bunch of crap, in 2016. He still stands by it, by the way. I read a whole book about saying, you know. But he's spent a period since compiling equally bogus dossiers

about individuals mainly in the UK, many of them in politics, falsely accusing them of being Russian spies. It's his kind of, it's his go-to. It's his playbook. Now, I actually wrote an investigation for the website Unheard last October. And I showed how he had used MPs to repeat false allegations in his dossiers about key

British individuals in Parliament where they were protected by parliamentary privilege and couldn't be sued. And Steele himself, on one occasion, was paid £30,000 for drafting a completely false set of allegations against a blameless businessman who took a huge hit as a result of the lies that Steele fed to the MP. Who is the MP? The MP was a guy called Liam Byrne, who is a very influential guy. He was a cabinet minister under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown.

He's the chair of the House of Commons Select Committee on business and trade. Now, he's just written a book, and it's called Why Populists are winning and how to beat them. And guess what? It says that the crucial thing is much tougher digital censorship. We have to stop lies being spread by hostile foreign powers like Russia. We have to protect people against disinformation. And the only way to do that is from, you know, far more intrusive levels of digital censorship. And yet, this person, not just against the guy I was speaking about just now,

for AIDS of Paring, but on at least two other occasions, has repeated lies, fed to him by Christopher Steele on the floor of the House of Commons, and got away with it. So it's a pretty polluted situation. Like you, we care a lot about craftsmanship at breaking history, how things used to be made, and whether that still matters today, which raises a fair question. Can you still build something well on purpose in America? Today's sponsor is doing exactly that. There, that's V-A-E-R, was founded in Los Angeles.

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That's all. The Devil Wears Prada 2, now playing everywhere. Okay, so I want to kind of get to just one point about Steele, which I find interesting, which is that he has been chasing these Russian ghosts and, you know, in my view, kind of poisoning our own discourse with false allegations. Yet, you know, he was in charge of the MI6's Russia desk when Alexander Litvinenko, who was a defector, was poisoned. with Polonium in 2006,

I just find it ironic that, you know, this guy who presents himself as the defender of the UK from Russia, at least a kind of, you could say, this terrible tragedy happened under his watch. Do you have any thoughts on that?

Well, I mean, I don't believe. The Russians poisoned Litvinenko. I'm not blaming Steele for it. What I'm saying is that... Of course. You're kind of in charge of that, you know, to make sure stuff like that. that doesn't happen.

See, I don't think he was really in charge of it. What I've been told is that, yeah, sure, he was in MI6. He had a career in MI6. He was the charge of the Russia desk at the time? I mean, he was... Well, he certainly wasn't in charge of the Moscow station. Fair, no, no, fair enough. That's a good point.

Okay, yes. Yeah. Yes, he did play a part in the Lipinian case investigation. Yeah, but, okay, fair enough. You know, he wasn't, it wasn't his responsibility entirely. No. You could argue with a lot of other people to go along, but that was, I would say that that is an intelligence failure against the Russians.

For sure. But the thing about Steve, he's monetized those connections. I mean, sure, he was involved in this very serious assassination on British soil. I mean, not in the assassination, but the investigation of it. But, you know, I mean, these bogus dossiers that he's been writing ever since, I mean, we know, of course, about Trump. But, I mean, I've got two of his dossiers against UK individuals. One's called Project Fish, the other one is called Project Delta.

And they're just full of fantasy. I mean, according to these Dothians, Steele apparently has access to SBR and FSB databases. He has incredible sources inside the Russian security state. Well, no, he doesn't. He's not been to Russia since 2009. He relies, like most of the private intelligence world, on subcontractors. I mean, you've alluded to,

to Danchenko, the guy who was the main source for the Trump staff, who of course was himself indicted, though I'm not guilty in the end. You know, this is a very unreliable actor. I mean, at one stage, one of his dossiers, he wrote that Boris Johnson had been targeted by the KGB from the time he was an undergraduate in Oxford, and that they were using his wife's carry to influence him. I mean, this is fantasy.

It's deranged. Yeah. I want to get to one of the unintended problems when you have this very irresponsible kind of practice of, you know, political parties accusing their critics of being foreign agents or Russian agents. And that is that occasionally there are Russian agents in our midst. Sure. There are foreign agents in our midst. And it makes them kind of, it makes any kind of accusation like that seem discredited in some ways because you're like, oh, I've heard this. before. And that's in some ways why I actually think that the moral panic generated by the Steele dossier and Russia Gate was actually in a weird way in Russia's interest. Because by making us kind of paranoid and then having institutions like the FBI discredited, it kind of helps with the

broader agenda of Moscow that is to kind of erode and eat away at the public trust of these institutions and ultimately social cohesion. Would you agree with that? I think I absolutely agree. I think it's a brilliant, well, if you ask that question, qui bono, yeah, it does benefit Russian. No question. If nobody trusts anything that is said. that relates to Russia or even if it doesn't relate to Russia, then that's a fantastic win for Russia because, yes, it arose faith in democracy. It suggests that we don't have a system that functions properly. And I would argue that in America, at least,

I don't know if it's the case in the UK, I'm not accusing influencers or podcasters of being under the spell of or in the pay of foreign governments. But what I would say is that certainly disinformation generated by state actors or terrorist groups or things like that has taken off and has really shaped a lot of opinions. I mean, there are plenty, I think, of valid criticism of Israel, of the Gaza War. But there was so much stuff that was kind of fed into TikTok that weren't even of the Gaza War that may have been from Syria or were, AI generated or turned out to be something that we didn't realize it was. I mean, you can look at all kinds of things that are just sort of bad information about that war.

The stupid stat about more than 200 journalists have been killed. A lot of those so-called journalists have been members of Hamas. This is an example of things like that. And so what, in a weird way, in trying to combat disinformation, the nanny staters in the UK and in America have ended up. being hoisted on their own butards and we are all suffering as a result. Because I think we would both agree there is such a thing

as disinformation and gatekeepers in the press, not the government, I would say of course it should be done by responsible journalism, are the ones that should sort of fend off against that in a functioning republic or a functioning democracy.

What we have today is there's been so much distrust in America of mainstream and elite journalists and these other institutions that it is, we're kind of an anything-goes moment where conspiracy theories have gained ground very quickly. I'm not saying that's because of Russia. I'm saying it's because in this process, we are, we've lost some of that social cohesion and public trust. Do you have any thoughts on that? I do. I mean, I think that the Gaza war is a very interesting case. But equally,

it so seemed to me that the manipulation of Western opinion that has taken place during that war is not really down to any state actors. It's certainly not down to Russia. I mean, it's essentially down. I wasn't accusing Russia. I was saying, right. I mean, and it's also because of a kind of receptiveness. Yeah. People want to believe this because, you know, to be blunt, they don't like Jews.

and this has enabled extreme propaganda to be treated as truth. And another part of this is that news organizations, which should have been far more rigorous, which should have treated outrageous claims made during that war, did not do their job. Now, I'm afraid I would hear a single out, especially the BBC. we saw a particular example, only a few weeks into the war. I think it was on October the 29th, 2023, when it was reported erroneously that the Al-Akhli Hospital in Gaza had been destroyed.

And the BBC had that as their lead story on the evening news and on their website, and they had very senior correspondents, including their international editor, Jeremy Bowen, stating this. Now, it turned out not to be true. It was almost certainly a misfired rocket from Palestinian Islamic jihad, as I'm sure you know, that hit the car park, the parking lot of the hospital.

The hospital itself was not destroyed and nothing like 500 people died. So, you know, the whole story was essentially bogus. But what shocked me, what really shocked me was the postscript. And that was about two, three weeks later, Jeremy Bowen was speaking on some panel. and he was challenged on the BBC's misreporting of those bogus claims, which of course had come from Hamas. And he basically said, I'm not losing any sleep over that. It's really not a problem.

Well, when a journalist, as an important and senior position, is simply insucian, is simply saying, I don't care. I mean, you're getting somewhere like, Okay, it doesn't really matter on the detail here. It speaks to my broader truth, you know, this kind of nonsense. So, you know, we look at one side of this equation. Okay, there are some state actors who, no doubt, would like propaganda to be picked up. And I think Iran has probably been extremely assiduous at doing that in the last few weeks. But we only look at one side of this point. The other side is,

what about journalists? I mean, what all these events show is that the need for proper, rigorous, old-fashioned journalism, of which, you know, which I'm so pleased to see the free press is doing so brilliantly at, which is why I'm a huge fan of the free press, those skills are more needed than ever, and unfortunately are not always being deployed.

And so that vulnerability that we have to, you know, bullshit on TikTok or whatever it is. It's partly, you know, its impact has been magnified by the failure of proper, straightforward, you know, legacy mainstream media to do its job. Well, that's, yes, it's a two-way street in some ways, but it's not helped by labor together.

It is not helped by, I hope that this is now a memory, but if Democrats come back into power and they revive their, their plans to try to set up, you know, government role in protecting Americans from so-called disinformation, you know, this problem will get worse. Because I think what we're really saying here is there are a number of galling elements of this great research and report that you've done, David. But the big takeaway, as I see it, is that we do not,

we want to have a bright line between the journalists and, the government. And what we don't want is political parties which are vying or competing for power in the government and our democracies to become, you know, the kind of guardians against the public for things that are false. That is the job of journalists. And so if the journalists themselves are not losing sleep when they get major stories about a war wrong, that is one half of the sort of broader problem. It's not just the appetite of politicians to censor what we can read and say. And I think the other thing that makes this so important is a very chilling thing. So we've mentioned already the Centre for Countering Digital Hate. It starts as the UK

organisation founded by Morgan McSweeney, based at Starmes Chief of Staff, and Imran Ahmed, who now lives in Washington, D.C. Now, it has redefined the idea of disinformation. They've tried to repackage it. So what was once called disinformation is now often called hate. Go on the Centre for Countering Digital Hate website. And what will you find? You'll find a whole section on what it calls the new climate denialism.

This is apparently a species of hate. Look at what they're actually trying to condemn here. And it's criticism of Britain's crazy net zero energy policy, which is destroying what's left of our heavy industry, has given us the highest industrial electricity bills in the world, or certainly in the developed world. And to argue against that is apparently now digital hate that must be clumped down upon, and that platforms must be made accountable. And you look at the demands they make. I mean, they have a fairly short list. They want to, they say, force social media platforms to, A, be transparent about and B, change their algorithms. So that as they see it, you know, stories full of hate or disinformation are no longer promoted or pushed at people because, you know, platforms supposedly in their account make money from more clicks.

So they want more controversy, even if it's, if it's, if it's, based on lies. They want surveillance, they want age-gating, they want people to be unable to access this stuff. I mean, here's a paradox. There is talk in the UK, the demand often made by these people that nobody under the age of 18 should be allowed to use social media. At the same time, the left of the Labour Party wants 16-year-olds to have a vote. Apparently you can vote for a new government. You know, I want to get back to your point. I mean, what you're showing is that this is the problem, that it starts with something that largely people would agree with. Like, there shouldn't be, you know, blatant racism or anti-Semitism online.

And you have to think a bit on this because at first, that sounds wonderful, right? I mean, it's like, yeah, I think it's wrong to spread that. It's unfair to people and minority groups. And, like, you know, once you start down that road, I mean, this is this, you know, they always go back to the example of Germany in the 1930s. and so forth. But then you think about it a little bit more, and what really we have to be wary of

as citizens in free countries is that we do not want the government or fashion a rod for our backs. So once you say one thing that almost everybody can agree with, you know, should be censored and monitored. Then you are opening the door to basically having a government agency

that would try to put their thumb the scale of the climate debate and sensible energy policies. And that's the problem. The problem is that it always starts with something that we all agree with. I mean, an example here and one that, you know, I think I certainly agree that child pornography is absolutely horrible, but that has become the nose under the tent for the FBI to monitor all kinds of web traffic that have nothing to do with child pornography. So we can even agree. Child pornography is a scourge and pederasty and, you know, all of that

is illegal and we want the government to try to stamp it out, of course. However, once you start giving the government the power to do that, they always, and that's what happened we saw in the period after Trump, which is that it started with Russian disinformation. And by the end of Trump's first term, it was medical misinformation, it was online hate, it was any number of things. And you just had this huge list of stuff that the government, had an interest in telling social media companies or pressuring social media companies to, you know, not publish. And that right there is for me the fundamental problem.

And unfortunately, it seems like the people who call themselves ironically liberals are the ones who are pushing it. So it's extraordinary, you know. And that's why the free speech union is so important in the UK. And, you know, we used to have something called the ACLU in America. the American Civil Liberties Union, which has lost its way. But we could use a free speech union here, too, I think. Well, you know, you talked about medical misinformation. It's a very interesting example.

So one of the big things that this little ecosystem has been pushing, or was pushing heavily during the COVID-19 pandemic, was so-called misinformation on that. Now, what was this misinformation or disinformation? What was this species of digital hate? It was suggestions. COVID emanated from a lab in China. Exactly.

Which not many serious people any longer dispute, but back in 2020, it was disinformation and hate to say that. It's also now becoming sadly apparent that for some classes of younger patient, MRNA COVID vaccines have caused heart damage. And, you know, a group of people who were not at serious risk of having, you know, life-threatening symptoms from COVID may have suffered serious health impacts from MRNA vaccines. Now, one of the people who was saying that back in the day was Robert F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., the parent health secretary of the States.

He was a target of the Center for Countering Digital Hate in its heyday, and in its days when it was attending meetings at the White House. Yeah, but we should say that we should make clear. RFK, as occasionally right, shouldn't have been targeted. He was a legitimate political voice, or at least targeted. He should have been censored, I would argue. But on the other hand, RFK Jr. also says that all vaccines are bad, and has gone much further than just the MRNA or a sort of modest claim that I think is defensible.

For some patients, the MRNA vaccine has caused heart damage and you should be aware of it. I mean, the larger issue, of course, was that all the data we had is that young healthy people were not really affected by COVID in the way that other subsets were. So the idea that everybody had to have a vaccine was, you know, arguably an honest mistake. The problem is that once you've set up a censorship regime, that it's very difficult to get the right feedback and nimbly adjust. Instead, you have a bunch of, you know, sort of midwits enforcing an old dogma that is no longer even true, you know, sort of making fools of everybody.

But there is, I think, this gets back to what we were saying about the press, which is that we do not want the government to tell us, you know, to protect us from false. We do not want the government to protect us in terms of the speech realm in that way. We want the government to protect us obviously even physical harm and things like that. But at the same time, the press has an obligation that when you have a demagogue and when you have somebody out there saying, you know, rubbish, to call them out on it. That's kind of what our job is. You know what I'm saying?

So if you're worried about the spread of disinformation, and I don't think it's entirely, I don't think we should be worried about it. say. I mean, so that, but it's again, it's the responsibility of the press. And what we've, we've seen is that the scourge of disinformation or the scourge of like rabbit hole, conspiracism and so forth, that we is, it is not just for the so-called uneducated. It's something that affects the highly educated. And it's something that all of us are, and that's why it's important. That's why free speech. That's why the principle of free speech is important is because it is a necessary condition to get into the truth. And that's kind of what you guys are all about.

That is right. I mean, I have very little time for anti-vax campaigners. Yes, there are perhaps some question marks over RNA COVID vaccines and young people, but in general, I'm a passionate supporter of vaccination. But I think, you know, what we are facing here is a stark choice. So on the one hand, the answer that, as you say, ironically, liberals are coming up with is silent dissent. Stop the flow of information by control and censorship. On the other hand, the alternative is win the argument, present accurate information.

Yes, win the argument. Have the debate. And, you know, there are people who are, you know, we at the free speech union, we have a dual role. We campaign, we engage with policymakers, legislators and so forth. We also represent people. We have a big legal division. We support people who are facing legal sanctions of one kind or another through speaking their mind.

I mean, one example you may well be familiar is the arrest of the comic TV writer Graham Leinahan. We interviewed him for our episode on the perils to free speech in the UK, which is, you know, he pounced on by five armed police officer at Heathrow Airport for stating biological truth. I mean, you know, it's extraordinary. So we represent people and, you know, many other cases. Some of the people we represent, I really have little time for their views. I mean, we are representing certain people who have been arrested because they support an organization called Palestine Action.

Now, Palestine Action is not my cup of tea. It's a pretty radical organization. It's committed some serious acts of vandalism, for example, a factory used by the Israeli firm Elbit Systems. Yeah, no, no, no, and more than dandalism, they actually injured pretty serious. Yeah, they did indeed. So, you know, I am the last person to support Palestine action. On the other hand, what the government has done is that it has proscribed Palestine action as a terrorist organization, which means that it is a criminal offense to express support for Palestine action.

So what has been the result? There have been big protests with basically well-meaning. meaning liberal people, old ladies, priests, goodness knows what, basically saying, not, you know, we want to destroy the state of Israel, but we have a right to say we support palatine action and not to be criminalized for it. There was a demonstration about two weeks ago in central London on a weekend. Over 500 people were arrested. They've now been, they're facing potential conviction under a terrorism act, which means that they'll be

denied the ability to travel. I'll be on no fly list. This is a totally disproportionate response. And so, you know, you come back to Voltaire. You may disagree passionately with somebody, but you should defend to the death, the right to express their opinion, unless, you know, it is directly threatening in terms of, you know, incitement to violence, the fire in the crowded theater argument and so on. Yeah.

I mean, this is, anyway, we could go on for a while, but we are kind of at our time limit right now. I want to thank you, David, Rose. This is great. Mazel to have on the report. I'm so glad we did this. What a great interview. You filled with lots of good information.

I really enjoyed it.